I blogged yesterday about the rescue of a cold-stressed manatee from a lagoon at Imperial Sugar. It turns out there were two manatees spotted, but only one was captured and driven to SeaWorld in Orlando, where it's recuperating.

The other one was first sighted at Weyerhaeuser on Dec. 8 by mill staff.

I thought I was asking a simple question. The Palmetto Pipeline public meetings/open houses/public hearings that have been held across south Georgia over the last two weeks, were they supposed to be official public hearings under Ga. law and DOT regulations or not? It seemed like a yes or no.

I was out on Wilmington Island this morning and checked out the new $5,500 sign the Wilmington Island Garden Club installed recently. A vandal shot an arrow into the "M" in "Wilmington," breaking it. Adding insult to that injury, there was a dead otter in the pull-off right in front of the sign. Even worse, right next to the dead mama otter was her baby, also dead. Johnny Mercer is four lanes there, with marsh on either side, and it looked like they had both been hit by a vehicle. That's a tough place to be an otter.

Georgia Public Broadcasting is running a story today about the Olin Corporation in Augusta and how it legally discharges more than 700 pounds of mercury into the air and the Savannah River each year. The controversy isn't new (the Augusta Chronicle has covered it extensively), but after this summer's to-do about a fifth-grader accidentally spilling a pound of mercury at Pooler Elementary is does seem especially interesting for those of us down river. Environmental groups such as Oceana and the Savannah Riverkeeper advocate for the company to switch its chlorine production to a process that doesn't use mercury. Proposed legislation would eliminate the mercury process, too. I know the adage that "the dose makes the poison." But if we all spent about $150,000 to clean up a pound of mercury at a school, what does that mean for pumping 700 times that much into the air and water?

A reader e-mailed to say it frustrates him to see the city flushing water out hydrants at they same time officials urge water conservation. Why don't they capture the water for reuse? asks Allen Byrd, whose office at Bay and E. Lathrop gives him a view of the flushing hydrant at what seems like weekly intervals.

I asked city of Savannah environmental planner Laura Walker about the issue. Coincidentally, she had just witnessed a flushing hydrant this week while giving a stormwater tour to visiting stormwater professionals. It opened her eyes to how much water is wasted in the exercise. As somebody big into water conservation she didn't like seeing all that H20 rushing into the Springfield Canal. She had two initial thoughts on doing things better. First, she said, maybe there's a way to flush some water onto land it could soak into, rather than just into streets where it picks up pollutants and then enters stormwater drains. Then she remembered that Park and Tree uses pumper trucks. She seemed to have an aha! moment thinking about how it may be possible to coordinate the pumper trucks with hydrant flushing.

Last Thursday a team from Georgia's Department of Natural Resources helped untangle an endangered right whale calf from heavy fishing gear off the coast of St. Catherines. The whale was just a 2-year-old but still big and dangerous at 30 feet long. Here are some pictures of the successful effort, courtesy Ga. DNR. The pole in the photo has a knife mounted on the end. That's what they used to slice through one rope that went through the calf's mouth and another tangled around its head. They had to get very close to the animal in 2-3 foot seas to make this work. But they did it. This was the fifth entangled right whale DNR has seen and worked to rescue this calving season. So far, three have been freed.

The federal government issued a report today about the status of wetlands on the East Coast. We lost about 59,000 acres of coastal wetlands a year from 1998-2004, the report concludes. That's an area about twice the size of the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge every year, or 14 refuge-sized chunks over the time studied.The report blames the population density of the coast, which not only hastens the loss of wetlands with roads and buildings, but also makes them harder to restore because the land is too valuable for other uses.

Ruby-throated hummingbirds, which travel more than 1,200 miles from wintering grounds in Central America to Georgia, are on their way back to the state, reports the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.

That means it’s a good time to plant flowers that provide them with nectar, and DNR’s Nongame Conservation Section has free native wildflower seeds available to get you started.

The Ogeechee-Canoochee Riverkeeper recently won $10,000 in a contest sponsored by beer maker MillerCoors. Supporters voted online for their project of choice, and the local riverkeeper got 2,000 votes. Director Chandra Brown says she'll use the money to test for mercury in 150 fish -- including redfish, catfish, largemouth bass, and redbreast -- in rivers in and around the coast this summer. She's looking for volunteers to help catch the fish. Check here for more details or call Brown at 866-942-6222.